Cosmologists Out of Touch with Reality

Secular cosmologists can’t find things that they tell us should exist. Is reality the problem, or is it dead-end thinking instead?

Dark Matter Remains Lost

They’ve had decades to find it, even with ever-increasing sensitivity of detectors, but they continue to fail. Does dark matter exist outside of theories that require it? Science news reports continue to tantalize readers, but then fail to deliver.

Hunting for dark matter in the smallest galaxies in the Universe (Phys.org). “Dark matter makes up most of the mass of the Universe, yet it remains elusive,” this article states. If you can’t find it, how can you know it makes up most of the mass of the Universe? Cosmologists assume that motions inside galaxies are proxies for dark matter, but the models that “measure” dark matter are theory-laden. When one theory’s model fails to match expectations, another model takes its place. One dwarf galaxies used as a prop for the story, Eridanus II, now appears to have “less dark matter in its centre than expected” (expected by whom? See Tontology). “If similar results are found for a larger sample of galaxies, this could have wide-ranging implications for the nature of dark matter.” In other words, the man on the street will remain unaffected. It will only increase the secretions of sweat in the foreheads of certain theorists still trying to get in touch with reality.

Photograph of dark matter. White background provided for contrast.

Our study suggests the elusive ‘neutrino’ could make up a significant part of dark matter (Ian G. McCarthy at The Conversation). McCarthy defends the ‘standard model’ because of its success, but then admits to an utter failure to find dark matter that the theory predicts make up 80% of the matter in the universe. Do you call that success? His proposal, that “extremely light particles called neutrinos are likely to make up some of the dark matter – challenges our current understanding of its composition.” Is that another success?

This Is (Probably) the Only Way Dark Matter Interacts with Ordinary Matter (Harrison Tasoff at Space.com). Hedging his bets with “probably” (but without calculating any odds), Tasoff admits another upset in thinking. “Dark matter has led scientists on a bit of a wild goose chase lately,” he says. Is it just a bit of a wild goose chase, or a complete one? Read on: “New, more accurate measurements of a group of colliding galaxies appear to indicate that the mysterious substancelikely interacts with itself and ordinary matter only via gravity, reversing conclusions scientists had drawn from observations three years earlier.”

“It’s a nutty idea, but every idea of what dark matter might be is a nutty idea.”

Beguiling dark-matter signal persists 20 years on (Davide Castelvecchi at Nature). Cosmologists sometimes falsely claim to have “seen” dark matter, but it’s fake news: they only see its effects, if their theories are right. This “signal” is just a blip in some data that might encourage some model-builders. Catelvecchi admits, “A number of increasingly sophisticated experiments that should also see dark matter — although with different techniques — have so far found none.” He says that dark matter makes up 85% of matter, compared to the 80% claimed by McCarthy. When you’re dealing with mysterious, unknown stuff, what difference does 5% make anyway?

Artist conception of dark matter expanding in a field of dark energy.

Is Dark Matter Made Up of Mini Black Holes from the Big Bang? (Meredith Fore at Live Science). In honor of the late Stephen Hawking, Fore puts forward the “controversial” idea that his mini-black holes make up the missing matter. One LIGO scientist quoted in the article found his confidence in the claim “shaken” over the last year on evidential grounds, but he still finds it “intriguing” and “very interesting.” The last sentence in the article can be taken as a status report on the quest to discover dark matter. It comes from Marc Kamionkowsi at Johns Hopkins University: “It’s a nutty idea, but every idea of what dark matter might be is a nutty idea.”

Missing Antimatter Remains Missing

The Most Precise Measurement of Antimatter Yet Deepens the Mystery of Why We Exist (Aylin Woodward at Space.com). Big bang theory predicts equal amounts of matter and antimatter should exist, because almost every particle in the particle zoo has its own antiparticle. Aarhus University failed to find any difference between these opposing twins. Woodward concludes, “to an incredibly high degree of precision [2 parts per trillion], antimatter and matter behave identically.” The universe should have equal amounts of each, but it doesn’t. This “elephant in the living room” of cosmology is causing angst for Jeffrey Hangst at Aarhus, whose team made the difficult measurements on anti-hydrogen, which can only be sustained briefly in magnetic fields before it annihilates its ordinary-matter counterpart.

Be happy, though, that this is the case, Woodward comments:

Physicists posit that there should have been equal amounts of matter and antimatter created by the Big Bang, and each would have ensured the other’s mutual destruction, leaving a baby universe bereft of life’s building blocks (or anything, really). Yet here we are, in a universe made up almost wholly of matter.

It isn’t the place for humans to tell the universe what it should have done. The “kicker” for Woodward is that “We don’t know of any primordial antimatter that made it out of the Big Bang.” The universe tells humans what to do, not the other way around.

Every once in awhile, we like to show what the secular cosmologists are doing, lest anyone think the “hard sciences” are invincible. In these cases, it looks like their failings are still being evinced.

Are they not trying to build a mythical world picture by natural causes as a way to avoid considering the real reality of design?